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Disclosure of private e-mails from government officials has been a legal issue in many states.

With those people, I'm very far apart, because I believe that government access to communications and stored records is valuable when done under tightly controlled conditions which protect legitimate privacy interests.

Prior to email, our private correspondence was secured by a government institution called the postal service. Today, we trust AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, or Gmail with our private utterances.

We have never really had absolute privacy with our records or our electronic communications - government agencies have always been able to gain access with appropriate court orders.

Despite being in public life, I value my own privacy immensely and would be as concerned as anyone else if I thought my mobile phone records could be easily available to officials across government.

In the Federal Government, electronic records are as indispensable as their paper counterparts for documenting citizens' rights, the actions for which officials are accountable, and the nation's history.

Governmental surveillance is not about the government collecting the information you're sharing publicly and willingly; it's about collecting the information you don't think you're sharing at all, such as the online searches you do on search engines... or private emails or text messages... or the location of your mobile phone at any time.

I know of no government official who would welcome an army of inspectors general combing through four years of emails on their unclassified accounts. That's why they use government accounts, where the government remains responsible for security, and they don't mingle personal correspondence with official.

We get information in the mail, the regular postal mail, encrypted or not, vet it like a regular news organization, format it - which is sometimes something that's quite hard to do, when you're talking about giant databases of information - release it to the public and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks.

While the federal government is required by law to document publicly its wiretapping of phone lines, it is not required to do so with Internet communications.